CONTENTS

Issue 9
May-June 05

My View of the World

Lifestyle
I walked the ways of a new worldview. If only for a short time, during the past two months. Marisol and I toured six different co-housing facilities in the DC area. Then we visited the organic farm that provides food for our Community-Supported Agriculture subscription (CSA). Also I read Celestine Prophecy which offers insight into living a new life, lit by a different worldview, one hidden from modern eyes perhaps for millenia.

See more on these topics below.

Systems Thinker
Coincident with this edition of Cosmopathy, my first piece will be published in the Systems Thinker. This moment represents the shifting of my writing towards topics of systems thinking and sustainability. You can see my viewpoint piece that urges systems thinkers to incorporate worldview into all change efforts.

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Notes in May-June

Co-Housing and a Diversified Portfolio
Conventional investing wisdom proclaims that we must create diversified portfolios to hedge against diminished value in any particular asset class. This advice resonates as well for civilization change folks. Just as we create a portfolio that hedges against changes in interest rates, equity value declines, and currency devaluations, we also need to hedge against economic collapse. That’s right economic collapse. Even the most bull-headed neo-liberal capitalists have to admit that the stock market can at least plummet. Yet most portfolios do not hedge collapse, simply because collapse lurks far outside their worldview.

Marisol and I, nonetheless, aim to join or create a co-housing project in Costa Rica. This project would uphold self-sufficiency as a primary principle. Only self-sufficiency in the non-monetary sense (grow your own food, generate your own power, etc.) can hedge against economic collapse. Of course this approach is riddled with assumptions as well, but it’s a start... and another discussion.

Self-sufficiency did not appear in the principle lists of any of the seven co-housing projects we visited. All connected themselves deeply to global society, like a patient to a dialysis machine. Despite this interdependence, these projects still developed a deeper sense of community than most people enjoy in modern America. They all had common spaces (or planned to), made decisions by consensus, ate communal meals, and hosted many community-wide activities. Some emphasized environment; some built open green spaces; a couple could articulate their principles (or at least the members I asked); individuals owned all living spaces whether houses or condos (when all property is communally owned, it’s considered a co-op); and participation was available primarily to upper middle class people.

Modern civilization’s worldview demands porous societies. People move relatively easily between countries and states (note the difficulty the government has in patrolling the southern border). Many traditional or indigenous barriers that maintained cohesive groups like tribes have fallen to conquest of modern society. So when a group tries to preserve its culture or emphasize cohesive community, by necessity and to some degree it must hold back the outside world. This arm’s -length culture often invites derision and persecution. We often belittle these in-groups by calling them “cults.” This cohesiveness, some say, has been the root of all persecution for Jews throughout history.

Co-housing too has suffered this bias. “Co-housing” can provoke images of communes — or worse — of communists. But that’s changing more and more as people’s craving to belong to community awakens. Co-housing as a movement (its modern version began in Denmark) blossoms around the world, becoming increasingly common in years ahead. James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century, predicts that in a post-oil era, only small cohesive communities will be successful. Though I haven’t read his book, you might check out an interview with him in Grist Magazine.

I came away with the conclusion that to make a self-sufficient co-housing community work, we would need to join with a group of founders, a developer, and probably additional capital or land. It’s expensive.

Organic Farm

Marisol and I held a winter share in a Community-Supported Agriculture program at Even Star Farm in Lexington Park, MD. This meant that we paid a fee for a season and every week we received a share of the farm’s harvest. A personal description of the farm’s condition accompanied every delivery; it recounted how the weather affected output and what crops did well. Those and other topics bring subscribers closer to the food and its place of origin. The best way to know the place of origin, of course, is to visit it.

And that’s what we did. Even Star Farm sponsored an open house last weekend. We traveled two hours to southern Maryland to tour the farm, learn about its major issues (for example, without subsidies conventional farming wouldn’t last four months while organic farms, rich in diversity, enjoy no subsidies and can actually turn a profit), and of course test its freshest produce!

What lies most beyond one’s worldview, I suppose, is the importance of systems: how soil makes healthy food healthy, free of contaminants, full of flavor. Most of us buy our food in a supermarket and have no idea really what we’re eating. Most of us aren’t aware that the nutritional value of broccoli for example has decreased 90% in the last century because soil nutrients depend almost exclusively on the formulas of chemical fertilizers. Vegetables directly reflect the richness of organic soil.

Little girl helps me collect strawberries, which as the farm manager says, do not make
money, but do make customers happy. (photo: Marisol Mayorga)

We hope now to start a CSA neighborhood with the same farm in our own eco-living building here in front of Takoma Metro Station, District of Columbia.

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What I’m Reading: Celestine Prophecy

James Redfield’s Celestine Prophecy in 1993 climbed to the top of the New York Times Bestseller’s List. How did a book about spirituality ever muscle its way there? How did a book whose protagonist basically succumbed to a series of apparent coincidences, who ultimately didn’t control any aspect of his fate (in the book at least), make it to the top? How did a book that blasphemed history by saying that the Mayans predated the Incas — in the same exact geographical location! — earn top rank?

Redfield didn’t succeed because of stellar writing, he succeeded because the spiritual dimensions of our life and how to take advantage of them tugged at loose ends in people’s lives. As more and more people look for a new way to live, a way that fulfills deep human needs (and materialism hasn’t done that), this book, among others, offers some tantalizing options.

The plot revolved around an ancient Inca manuscript that outlined nine steps or insights to what could be called spiritual enlightenment. The Catholic Church forced the Peruvian government to suppress the teachings because they directly threatened the conventional worldview. Many people including the protagonist, however, pursued the teachings to save them. Therein lied the book’s conflict.

Redfield later wrote the Tenth Insight and Celestine Vision, a non-fiction essay of the theories and practices he integrated into his fictional works. While I don’t want to ruin the book for anyone (and you’ve had plenty of time to pick it up!), he describes a basic theory of energy. Modern citizens have become increasingly disconnected from nature, from the universal energy around us. As society increasingly focused its paradigm on individualism and reductionism, people lost awareness of their participation in a greater energy — yet the basic need for that energy remained. Fulfillment of that need people could not buy with money; the energy needed, however, could be stolen from other people. It could also be given.

Redfield reduces most of human conflict to people’s conscious and unconscious gambits to receive energy from others. For example, when we win an argument, we feel elated and satisfied and the loser feels deflated and depressed. Redfield says that couplet of feelings results because the winner drew energy from the loser. In this book, this energy transfer is very literal. He describes human auras that with practice anyone can actually see, just like some people claim to do with extra-sensory perception.

But people can learn to receive their energy from the universe around them instead of stealing it from others. This reconnection lies at the heart of spiritual development, promotes compassion for others, and emphasizes great relationships over great materialism.

The insights also explain the role of coincidences in helping us move through life. By paying attention to them — even the most subtle or innocuous — we can ascertain their purpose, and they can guide our lives.

I read the book because I am interested in teaching novels. Celestine Prophecy aimed so intently on teaching that it nearly sacrificed the story along the way. Fortunately its message held it up. Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (my all-time most important book) is also a teaching novel that uses characters is a different way, with a more compelling plot, but likewise with a very intentional message to deliver. In both cases, the novels’ success is that they challenged the conventional worldview. They did that well and have become classics in their own right.

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Featured Link

For a discussion on whole systems, visit www.worldtrans.org/whole.html.

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Notice the design of Eastern Village in Silver Spring, MD, an urban co-housing project. All units are inward facing to promote neighborly interaction. The open space has no cars, allowing kids to play freely and landscaping. The entrance is clearly demarcated, promoting security.

James Howard Kunstler

“Cosmopathy” is the pathology of worldviews, whereby a person suffers from competing worldviews or the need to change worldviews because the gap between the worldview’s beliefs and perceived reality cause a breakdown, a condition which the Worldview Change Project aims to help.  Cosmopathy is distributed to those interested in the progress of the WCP.  Your name can be added or deleted by submitting a request to the author.